Monday, July 28, 2003

Desktop Linux is a dancing bear -- remarkable that it works, but you don't expect it to be graceful (and it isn't). When you start it up (I'm using Red Hat 9, pre-installed) it looks remarkably like a real desktop computer system -- icons, task bars, the works.

Underneath of course is Unix.

I've been saying this a lot lately and I may as well say it here: Unix went from being the worst operating system available to being the best without really undergoing any improvement.

I want to use Linux because I want and need the openness, plus I'm cheap. BUT, I'm a real adult person with not much time, so I want the openness and programmability to be SIMPLE, ELEGANT, and ACCESSIBLE. Am I in a vanishingly small demographic or something? [Answer: yes]

Saturday, July 26, 2003

Well, I was just forced to do modifications to a CSS file to get this thing the way I liked. Gad, what an ugly mess of syntax the whole web world is. I've never been involved in constructing any but simple websites (static or dynamic via HTML generation), so I've never been forced to deal with the horrible mess of HTML, Javascript, Java, CSS, PHP, and all the browser-specific variations thereof. Fortunately I never will, there are armys of unemployed web hackers out there to hire if things ever get that far, but it's a pity it requires so much useless and divergent expertese. Reminds me of Unix (and I'm sure it's not a coincidence).

I have friends trying to fix this with a single language that is supposed to be elegant, powerful, and capable of replacing the mess. The idea of Water is to combine features of Lisp, Javascript (prototype-based OOP), all in a unified XML syntax. The big problem here (aside from the general problem of getting a new language accepted at all) is that nobody really wants to write code using an XML syntax.

If they put a GUI front-end (or even a Lisp-syntax front-end) they might have something.

The idea for this organization came to me as I was walking along...it captured me due to its inherent irony, or so I thought. Being a parent is kind of a cure for anarchism, or so it seemed to me. Yet many former anarchists or freedom-inclined individuals suddenly find themselves in the position of having to be authority figures, ordering people about and enforcing disciplinary measures. A hard situation, and certainly it deserves a support group.

Well, of course, thanks to the richness of reality and Google, I find that this already exists, sort of, although the ironic aspect seems to be missing.

There's actually a whole spectrum of non-authoritarian parenting thought out there, of course. Most of it seems too naive or ideology-driven for my taste. Take, for instance, the group/movement Taking Children Seriously.

"We believe that it is possible and desirable to bring up children entirely without coercion (i.e. without doing things to them against their will, or making them do things against their will), and that children are entitled to the same rights, respect and control over their lives as adults. "

They lose me right there. But they are British, and so can at least defend these manifestly silly ideas with great prose and energy.

TCS depends quite a bit on the philosophy of Karl Popper, who I also think is fairly silly.

Wednesday, July 02, 2003

"For, whatever was the case in de Tocqueville's day, not the passion for egalitarianism but individualist, that is anti-authoritarian, antinomian, though curiously legalistic, anarchism has become the core of the value system in the U.S.A."

Yes -- and it's especially odd that it's the conservatives who seem to lead in (supposedly) antiauthoritarian attitudes. They portray themselves as insurgents against the supposed liberal establishment, who makes horribly restrictive rules against their freedom to fire guns in restaurants and drive SUVs in duck blinds.

Our politics are twisted up in weird ways that makes it almost impossible for one side to understand itself, let alone the others.

Tuesday, July 01, 2003

It's so irritating that in Visual Studio, you are not simply working on a "project", let along a "program" or "module", but a solution. It's this intrusion of marketing speak into the sacred space of the programming environment, among many other things, that is driving me towards Linux.